Inventor Elisha Otis Biography Inventor: Elisha Graves Otis Criteria; First to invent. First to patent. First practical. Entrepreneur. Birth: August 3, 1811 in Halifax, Vermont Death: April 8, 1861 in Yonkers, New York Nationality: American Invention: elevator, safety brake in 1852 Function: noun / elï¿½eï¿½vaï¿½tor Definition: A platform or an enclosure raised and lowered in a vertical shaft to transport people or freight. The shaft contains the operating equipment, motor, cables, and accessories. Patent: 31,128 (US) issued January 15, 1861 Milestones: 1852 invents a safety latch for hoisting equipment 1853 starts a company to manufacture safe elevators.

Sells elevator to hoist freight 1854 Otis demonstrates the elevator at the World's Fair, Crystal Palace exposition in New York City 1857 Installs the first passenger safe elevator in a New York department store 1861 receives patent for improvements to hoisting apparatus, safety brake 1861 after his death his sons form Otis Brothers & Company 1873 over 2,000 Otis elevators were in use in office buildings, hotels and department stores 1898 Otis Brothers merged with 14 other elevator entities to form the Otis Elevator Company 1903 introduced the gearless traction electric elevator 1931 first Otis double-deck elevator was installed elevator, safety elevator, safety brake for elevators, elisha graves otis, otis elevatorm UTC, patent 31128, invention, history, inventor of, history of, who invented, invention of, fascinating facts. The Story: Imagine the skyline of a modern city if the elevator did not exist. Buildings would be limited to five or six stories. Most of the architecture of the 20th and 21st century would be impossible.

Office towers, hotels and high-rise apartments would hardly stand in their present form. The need for vertical transport is as old as civilization. Over the centuries, mankind has employed ingenious forms of lifting. The earliest lifts used man, animal and water power to raise the load. Lifting devices relied on these basic forms of power from the early agricultural societies until the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. From ancient times through the Middle Ages, and into the 13th century, man or animal power was the driving force behind hoisting devices. In ancient Greece, Archimedes developed an improved lifting device operated by ropes and pulleys, in which the hoisting ropes were coiled around a winding drum by a capstan and levers. By A.D. 80, gladiators and wild animals rode crude elevators up to the arena level of the Roman Coliseum. Medieval records contain numerous drawings of hoists lifting men and supplies to isolated locations. Among the most famous is the hoist at the monastery of St. Barlaam in Greece. The monastery stood on a pinnacle approximately (200 ft) above the ground. Its hoist, which employed a basket or cargo net, was the only means up or down.

The first elevator designed for a passemger was built in 1743 for King Louis XV at his palace in France. The one-person contraption went up only one floor, from the first to the second. Known as the "Flying Chair," it was on the outside of the building, and was entered by the king via his balcony. The mechanism consisted of a carefully balanced arrangement of weights and pulleys hanging inside a chimney. Men stationed inside the chimney then raised or lowered the Flying Chair at the king's command. By 1850 steam and hydraulic elevators had been introduced, but it was in 1852 that the landmark event in elevator history occurred: the invention of the world's first safety elevator by Elisha Graves Otis. The first passenger elevator was installed by Otis in New York in 1857. After Otis' death in 1861, his sons, Charles and Norton, built on his heritage, creating Otis Brothers & Co. in 1867.

By 1873 over 2,000 Otis elevators were in use in office buildings, hotels and department stores across America, and five years later the first Otis hydraulic passenger elevator was installed. The Era of the Skyscraper followed.... and in 1889 Otis revealed the first successful direct-connected geared electric elevator machines. In 1898 overseas business had added to the company's growth, and Otis Brothers merged with 14 other elevator entities to form the Otis Elevator Company. In 1903 Otis introduced the design that would become the "backbone" of the elevator industry. The gearless traction electric elevator, engineered and proven to outlast the building itself. This ushered in the age of high-rise structures, ultimately including New York's Empire State Building, Chicago's John Hancock Center, and Toronto's CN Tower. Otis is part of United Technologies Corporation, a Fortune 500 company and world leader in the building systems and aerospace industries. With 1.7 million Otis elevators and 110,000 escalators in operation, Otis touches the lives of people in more than 200 countries around the world.

TO LEARN MORE Elisha Otis Elisha Otis Location of death: Yonkers, NY Cause of death: unspecified Remains: Buried, Oakland Cemetery, Yonkers, NY Gender: Male Nationality: United States Executive summary: Invented the safety elevator Elisha Otis was the master mechanic at the Maize & Burns bed factory in Yonkers, New York in 1852, where he devised a mechanical box for lifting bed parts from the workshop's ground floor to its second floor. Elevators had been used in parts of the world since the third century BC, but had always carried great risk of injury or death if the supporting cable snapped. Otis's innovation was what he called an "Improvement in Hoisting Apparatus", a safety brake that prevented the box from falling, even if the lift chain snapped. He attached heavy-duty sawtooth ratchet bars to the guard rails on all four sides of the box, and linked the elevator's lifting cable to a sturdy spring on top of the platform.

In normal operation, tension from the spring kept the ratchet bars from touching the side walls beyond the elevator, but if the cable broke, the tension would be released -- and the ratchet bars would immediately snap into matching holes alongside the wall, locking the platform firmly in place and keeping it from falling. When two businessmen inquired about purchasing his safety-hoist elevator, Otis rented manufacturing space and began producing his freight elevators. Business took off after an 1854 trade show where the inventor stood in one of his elevators at the second story level, and dramatically ordered a man with an axe to cut the elevator's rope. The platform fell about an inch and a half before the ratchets caught, and Otis emerged unharmed. Over the next three years he sold forty elevators, and in 1857 he sold the world's first safety elevator for passengers, installing it in New York City's famed five-story Haughwout Department Store. Safe and efficient up-and-down transit made taller buildings feasible, leading to the development of the skyscraper and modern urban architecture.

The company he founded, Otis Elevator , is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of United Technologies , and remains the world's leading manufacturer of elevators, escalators, and moving walkways. Father: Stephen Otis (b. 1773, d. 1859) Mother: Phoebe Glynn Otis (b. 1778, d. circa 1867) Sister: Filey Otis Harris (b. 1799, d. 1850) Sister: Laura Otis Carpenter (b. 1800, d. 1850) Brother: Chandler Otis (b. 1803, d. 1854) Brother: Samuel Alleyne Otis (b. 1805, d. 1889) Brother: James Madison Otis (b. 1807, d. 1813) Wife: Susan Houghton (b. 1811, m. 1834, d. 1842) Son: Charles Rollin Otis (elevator executive, b. 1835, d.

1927) Son: Norton Prentice Otis (elevator executive, b. 1840, d. 1905) Wife: Elizabeth Otis (b. 1811, d. 1845, d. 1903) Read This History of Elevators from Top to Bottom Brand New Images/ Stone/ Getty Images Updated October 18, 2015. An elevator by definition is a platform or an enclosure raised and lowered in a vertical shaft to transport people and freight. The shaft contains the operating equipment, motor, cables, and accessories. Primitive elevators were in use as early as the 3rd century BC, operated by human, animal, or water wheel power. In 1743, a counter-weighted, man-powered, personal elevator was built for King Luis XV connecting his apartment in Versailles with that of his mistress, Madame de Chateauroux, whose quarters were one floor above King Luis. 19th Century Elevators From about the middle of the 19th century , elevators were powered, often steam-operated, and were used for conveying materials in factories, mines, and warehouses.

In 1823, two architects Burton and Hormer built an "ascending room" as they called it, this crude elevator was used to lift paying tourists to a platform for a panorama view of London. continue reading below our video Should I Roll Over my 401K to an IRA? In 1835, architects Frost and Stutt built the "Teagle", a belt-driven, counter-weighted, and steam-driven lift was developed in England. Hydraulic Crane In 1846, Sir William Armstrong introduced the hydraulic crane, and in the early 1870s, hydraulic machines began to replace the steam-powered elevator. The hydraulic elevator is supported by a heavy piston, moving in a cylinder, and operated by the water (or oil) pressure produced by pumps. Elisha Otis In 1853, American inventor Elisha Otis demonstrated a freight elevator equipped with a safety device to prevent falling in case a supporting cable should break. This increased public confidence in such devices. In 1853, Elisha Otis established a company for manufacturing elevators and patented (1861) a steam elevator.

While, Elisha Graves Otis did not actually invent the first elevator, he did invent the brake used in modern elevators, and his brakes made skyscrapers a practical reality. In 1857, Elisha Otis and the Otis Elevator Company began manufacturing passenger elevators. A steam-powered passenger elevator was installed by the Otis Brothers in a five-story department store owned by E.W Haughtwhat & Company of Manhattan. It was the first public elevator. Biography of Elisha Otis Electric Elevators Electric elevators came into to use toward the end of the 19th century. The first one was built by the German inventor Werner von Siemens in 1880. Black inventor, Alexander Miles patented an electric elevator (U.S. pat#371,207) on October 11, 1887. Skyscraper History World's Tallest Towers The desire to build big is nothing new. Big buildings have been used to show off power and wealth; to honor leaders or religious beliefs; to stretch the limits of what's possible; and even as simple competition among owners, families, architects, and builders.

Some of the most dramatic buildings of the past include the pyramids in Egypt, the skinny towers stretching towards the sky in Italian hill towns, and the gothic cathedrals of France. While these types of buildings may look very different from each other, they all have one thing in common. They were built with masonry or stone walls supporting most of the weight (so-called load -bearing walls), including that of the floors, the people, and everything the rooms contained. Because of this, the height of these buildings was limited by how massive and heavy they had to be at the base. Removing the Obstacles Two developments in the 19th century paved the way for a whole new type of building: the skyscraper. The first was the development of a safe elevator . Primitive elevators of various designs had been used for centuries, and starting in the mid 19th century, steam-operated elevators were used to move materials in factories, mines, and warehouses. But these elevators were not considered safe for people; if the cable broke, they would plummet to the bottom of the elevator shaft.

Then in 1853, an American inventor named Elisha Graves Otis developed a safety device that kept elevators from falling if a cable should break. This new development had an enormous impact on public confidence. And later in the century, the switch to an electric motor made the elevator a practical solution to the problem of getting up and down tall buildings. The second development took place in Chicago. In 1871, Chicago suffered a devastating fire. In the years that followed, however, instead of recovering slowly, the city experienced explosive growth, and it quickly began to strain against its natural boundaries. By the 1880s, the available land for new buildings in this area could not keep up with demand; the only alternative was to build up. But in order to achieve the desired height, construction techniques had to change. A new method of building was developed that used a grid of steel beams and columns that were strong enough to support any stresses or forces a building might experience, including both the weight of the floor and the building contents, as well as the force of wind or even, in some areas, earthquakes. And with this new building method, the skyscraper was born and the race for the tallest building began.

Modern Materials Since the birth of the skyscraper, builders and engineers have continuously looked for ways to improve building methods and materials, in order to make structures stronger, taller, and lighter. Skyscrapers are built to last, so they must be made of materials that are strong; durable; resistant to the sun, wind, rain, frost, and snow; and affordable. Concrete is one of the most common materials, beyond the steel supports, because it is enormously versatile. Its composition can be changed depending on the needs of the building. It can be reinforced to make it stiffer and stronger by setting steel mesh or bars into the concrete. And additives can make it set or harden faster or slower depending on the needs of the design. Another very important material is glass. Because the steel skeleton now supports the main loads of the building, the outer skin only serves to keep the weather out and let light in, the more light the better. So glass walls became very popular beginning after World War II, because they are weatherproof while providing ample natural light, and also because they are so much lighter-and cheaper-than masonry or concrete.

The Forces of Nature But as buildings became taller and lighter, particularly the modern glass boxes that are so popular, skyscrapers began having trouble with the wind and they began to sway, some more than two feet in any direction! Engineers came up with new solutions for this problem, first installing diagonally braced steel trusses between central elevator shafts to create a stronger core, and then moving most of the beams and columns to the outside edge of the walls in order to make a stiff tube. A more unusual solution was devised to control sway in the 1970s called a tuned mass damper. This is a giant concrete block or weight, mounted with springs and shock absorbers on a lubricated plate, designed like a pendulum to move in one direction when a computer senses the structure has begun to move in the other, in order to counterbalance the motion. Building Badly Of course, with new technological developments, problems can occur. One dramatic and very visible example was the John Hancock Tower in Boston, now considered the city's most spectacular building. The structure is a tower of mirrored glass. But almost from the beginning, the glass panes failed.

The problem started during a winter gale in January 1973 while the tower was still under construction, when huge panels of glass, each weighing 500 pounds, shattered and fell to the street below. The streets and sidewalks were roped off as engineers tried to figure out what was going wrong. By April at least 65 panels had fallen and been replaced by plywood. Theories and rumors persisted, including that the tower was swaying too much, causing the windows to pop out, or that the tower's foundation was settling so significantly that it broke the windows. The truth was that the material itself failed. The window units had been manufactured using a fairly new process and the design was fatally flawed. Ultimately, all 10,344 windows had to be replaced and the building has been safe ever since. The Race for the Sky In the early 20th century, corporations built skyscrapers for the promotional value to increase name recognition.

Among the early skyscrapers in Manhattan were the Metropolitan Life Insurance Tower (700 feet, 50 stories), the Woolworth Building (the world's tallest from 1913-1930 at 792 feet, 60 stories), the Bank of Manhattan (927 feet, 71 stories), and the heavily decorated Chrysler Building (briefly the world's tallest in 1930 at 1046 feet, 77 stories). The Chrysler Building soon lost its crown to the Empire State Building, built during the Depression by a real estate developer, which reached a stunning 1,250 feet and 102 stories. The Empire State Building would reign supreme among skyscrapers for 41 years until 1972, when it was surpassed by the World Trade Center (1,368 feet, 110 stories). Two years later, New York City lost the distinction of housing the tallest building when the Sears Tower was constructed in Chicago (1450 feet, 110 stories).

And twenty-four years after that, for the first time the tallest skyscraper was no longer in the United States at all, but in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where the Petronas Towers were built in 1998 (1483 feet, 88 stories). Taipei 101 , completed in Taiwan in 2004, which tops out at 1,670 feet and 101 stories, held the title as the tallest building in world until January 2010, when the Burj Khalifa (formerly called the Burj Dubai), in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, became the world's tallest building at 2,716 feet (828 meters) and 160 stories. The Burj Khalifa contains the world's fastest elevators, 20.7 acres of glass, and is expected to use about 250,000 gallons of water per day. Did you know?

Elevator History - Invention of the Elevator Invention: elevator, safety brake in 1852 Function: noun / elï¿½eï¿½vaï¿½tor Definition: A platform or an enclosure raised and lowered in a vertical shaft to transport people or freight. The shaft contains the operating equipment, motor, cables, and accessories. Patent: 31,128 (US) issued January 15, 1861 Inventor: Elisha Graves Otis Criteria; First to invent. First to patent. First practical. Entrepreneur. Birth: August 3, 1811 in Halifax, Vermont Death: April 8, 1861 in Yonkers, New York Nationality: American Milestones: 1852 invents a safety latch for hoisting equipment 1853 starts a company to manufacture safe elevators.

Sells elevator to hoist freight 1854 Otis demonstrates the elevator at the World's Fair, Crystal Palace exposition in New York City 1857 Installs the first passenger safe elevator in a New York department store 1861 receives patent for improvements to hoisting apparatus, safety brake 1861 after his death his sons form Otis Brothers & Company 1873 over 2,000 Otis elevators were in use in office buildings, hotels and department stores 1898 Otis Brothers merged with 14 other elevator entities to form the Otis Elevator Company 1903 introduced the gearless traction electric elevator 1931 first Otis double-deck elevator was installed elevator, safety elevator, safety brake for elevators, elisha graves otis, otis elevatorm UTC, patent 31128, invention, history, inventor of, history of, who invented, invention of, fascinating facts. The Story: Imagine the skyline of a modern city if the elevator did not exist. Buildings would be limited to five or six stories. Most of the architecture of the 20th and 21st century would be impossible.

Office towers, hotels and high-rise apartments would hardly stand in their present form. The need for vertical transport is as old as civilization. Over the centuries, mankind has employed ingenious forms of lifting. The earliest lifts used man, animal and water power to raise the load. Lifting devices relied on these basic forms of power from the early agricultural societies until the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. From ancient times through the Middle Ages, and into the 13th century, man or animal power was the driving force behind hoisting devices. In ancient Greece, Archimedes developed an improved lifting device operated by ropes and pulleys, in which the hoisting ropes were coiled around a winding drum by a capstan and levers. By A.D. 80, gladiators and wild animals rode crude elevators up to the arena level of the Roman Coliseum. Medieval records contain numerous drawings of hoists lifting men and supplies to isolated locations. Among the most famous is the hoist at the monastery of St. Barlaam in Greece. The monastery stood on a pinnacle approximately (200 ft) above the ground. Its hoist, which employed a basket or cargo net, was the only means up or down.

The first elevator designed for a passemger was built in 1743 for King Louis XV at his palace in France. The one-person contraption went up only one floor, from the first to the second. Known as the "Flying Chair," it was on the outside of the building, and was entered by the king via his balcony. The mechanism consisted of a carefully balanced arrangement of weights and pulleys hanging inside a chimney. Men stationed inside the chimney then raised or lowered the Flying Chair at the king's command. By 1850 steam and hydraulic elevators had been introduced, but it was in 1852 that the landmark event in elevator history occurred: the invention of the world's first safety elevator by Elisha Graves Otis. The first passenger elevator was installed by Otis in New York in 1857. After Otis' death in 1861, his sons, Charles and Norton, built on his heritage, creating Otis Brothers & Co. in 1867.

By 1873 over 2,000 Otis elevators were in use in office buildings, hotels and department stores across America, and five years later the first Otis hydraulic passenger elevator was installed. The Era of the Skyscraper followed.... and in 1889 Otis revealed the first successful direct-connected geared electric elevator machines. In 1898 overseas business had added to the company's growth, and Otis Brothers merged with 14 other elevator entities to form the Otis Elevator Company. In 1903 Otis introduced the design that would become the "backbone" of the elevator industry. The gearless traction electric elevator, engineered and proven to outlast the building itself. This ushered in the age of high-rise structures, ultimately including New York's Empire State Building, Chicago's John Hancock Center, and Toronto's CN Tower. Otis is part of United Technologies Corporation, a Fortune 500 company and world leader in the building systems and aerospace industries. With 1.7 million Otis elevators and 110,000 escalators in operation, Otis touches the lives of people in more than 200 countries around the world.

TO LEARN MORE The most important invention in the history of the modern city - Salon.com Sunday, Feb 23, 2014 1:00 PM UTC The most important invention in the history of the modern city Without the elevator, the skylines of the world's greatest metropolises would look much, much different Excerpted from “Lifted: A Cultural History of the Elevator.” The history of the elevator begins with a piece of theater. From May to October 1854, the mechanic Elisha Graves Otis gave repeated performances at the Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations in New York City, designed to demonstrate the effectiveness of a safety device he had invented. On September 20 of the previous year, Otis founded the E. G. Otis Elevator Company in Yonkers, New York. But having received only one order in his first seven months of business, he was happy to accept an invitation to introduce his apparatus to the public.

In the Crystal Palace on Forty-Second Street (an imitation of the Crystal Palace built for the London World’s Fair in 1851), he installed a platform on guide rails on which he had himself hoisted into the air before the onlookers. When the platform had risen to its maximum height, to their horror, he severed its suspension cable. But instead of plunging fifty feet to the ground, the elevator stopped short after only a few inches of travel. “All safe, gentlemen, all safe,” Otis reassured the shocked fairgoers, and then explained his newly developed safety catch: a flat-leaf cart spring attached to the roof of the platform remained flexed as long as the elevator’s hoisting rope was taut, but flattened out as soon as the rope is severed, engaging notches cut into the guide rails and holding the platform in place. This experiment raised public awareness of the invention and in the following years resulted in numerous orders for freight elevators. Eventually, on March 23, 1857, the first passenger elevator was installed in the retail establishment of the New York porcelain and glass dealer Haughwout and Company.

Otis’s 1854 performance is regarded as the primal scene in the history of the elevator. In every encyclopedia article and handbook of the history of technology, as well as in individual monographs and collections of essays on the topic, this event serves as a demarcation line, dividing the predecessors from the canonical figures, the mere curiosities from the fully developed, production-ready apparatuses. It was only “by executing this stunt, before a gasping crowd, [that] Otis had heralded the birth of the elevator industry,” declared a publication about the development of the firm. At first glance, the consensus that his experiment represents a historical caesura, “one of the authentic great moments in architectural history,” stands in surprising contrast to the relatively modest scale of the innovation that Elisha Otis presented in 1854 and finally patented in January 1861, three months before his death. For the New York mechanic was by no means the inventor of the basic principle of the hoisting apparatus. His only addition to the machines already in existence was the safety device whose reliability he proved by using himself as a guinea pig.

A glance at the literature on architectural history reveals just how old the practice of vertical transport of goods and people is. In classical antiquity, hoisting devices appeared in the writings of Archimedes and Vitruvius. Isolated examples of passenger elevators also cropped up between the late seventeenth century and the early nineteenth century and are regularly mentioned in histories of technology. The Jena mathematician Erhard Weigel, for example, had a house built around 1670 in which he installed an arrangement of pulleys to convey him from one of its seven stories to another. In her final years, the ailing Austrian empress Maria Theresa would be lowered into the Crypt of the Capuchins by means of an elevator to pray at the graves of her parents.

In 1804, a freight and passenger elevator was built for a six-story cotton mill in Derbyshire, and in 1830, the English diplomat Charles Greville described in his memoirs an apparatus in the palace of the Sardinian royal couple in Genoa: “For the comfort of their bodies he has a machine made like a car, which is drawn up by a chain from the bottom to the top of the house; it holds about six people, who can be at pleasure elevated to any storey, and at each landing-place there is a contrivance to let them in and out.” Thus one wonders why the history of the elevator should rest on a single, canonical incident despite the multifarious data, a heterogeneity that only increased in the decades preceding Otis’s experiment. From the 1830s on, there was a multiplicity of well-documented elevator installations, both planned and completed, in Europe and the United States. By about 1830, freight elevators had been installed in numerous British textile factories, as one can read in the seventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

In European mines, moreover, the transition from hemp ropes and chains to the much greater load-bearing capacity of the iron-wire cable, invented in 1834, led to the rise of so-called rack-transport, a conveyance we can think of as the underground equivalent of a freight elevator. From then on, ore or coal was no longer hoisted to the surface in barrels dangling from a rope, but rather in multistory compartments running on guide rails and capable of carrying a large number of containers. (As we shall see, this development at first had no influence on the vertical transport of the miners themselves.) During the same period, however, there were increasing references to passenger elevators as well. The Bunker Hill Monument in Boston, a 221-foot granite obelisk erected in 1842, contains a steam-powered elevator that can carry six passengers to an observation platform. For the 1853 opening of the Exhibition of the Industry of all Nations (the very fair at which Elisha Otis would demonstrate his invention the following year), the architect James Bogardus planned a 325-foot tower whose top could be reached by a steam-powered elevator.

That same year, the New York steel producer Peter Cooper had a nine-story elevator shaft added to the company’s headquarters, although the mechanism was not installed until eleven years later. And finally, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine reported in June 1853 the imminent “introduction of a steam elevator” into private homes in New York, by means of which “an indolent, or fatigued, or aristocratic person” could have himself conveyed to the upper floors. One thing becomes clear from all these projects and installations: the dispersed and untidy beginnings of the elevator’s history cannot be easily consolidated into a unified foundational narrative. Elisha Otis’s “All safe, gentlemen, all safe” is less the “incunabular maxim of the modern passenger elevator” than a single voice in a mighty chorus of mid-nineteenth-century mechanics. So how did his 1854 experiment achieve its unparalleled status?

What was so epoch-making about Elisha Otis’s invention if even a recently published official company history states that his elevator in the New York Crystal Palace followed “already existing models”: “a platform set between vertical guide rails and raised and lowered on a rope wound around an overhead drum, the drum turned by belting that looped across the factory floor to the central, continuously turning steam engine.” Thus by 1854, both the propelling force and the mechanism itself were already well-known elements of the apparatus. The decisive difference, the detail that transformed scattered instances of the use of hoisting devices primarily for freight into the passenger elevator—an all but obligatory installation in every multistory building—consisted solely of Otis’s invention of the automatic safety catch. As one historian of the elevator put it, “Although people had been building hoists for at least two thousand years before that, their hoists had the serious fault of falling to the bottom should the lifting cable break. But Mr. Otis invented something that no one had ever seen before.

He built a hoist equipped with an automatic safety device to prevent the car from falling.” In light of the unanimous opinion that the real history of this means of conveyance begins only with Otis’s emergency brake, it is worthwhile to direct our attention to contemporary reactions to the event. In hindsight, the elevator experiment in the Crystal Palace appears to be the celebrated centerpiece of the Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations. In a 1911 biographical sketch in honor of the hundredth anniversary of Elisha Otis’s birth, his son Charles Otis remarked that the demonstration had been “one of the most interesting and attractive in the Fair,” a judgment that continued to hold sway in the following decades. Even the most recent publication on the history of the Otis Company states that by the end of the fair, the demonstration had “long since eclipsed the bigger show it was part of.” Apparently, the public was already aware of the historical dimensions of the scene. However, if one sets out to look for evidence of the demonstration in New York newspapers and magazines between May and October 1854, a different picture emerges.

While the New York Times carried almost daily reports on the Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations following its ceremonious reopening on May 1 (it was closed during the winter of 1853 –1854), including enthusiastic full-page articles about main attractions such as the hot air balloon ascent from the fairgrounds on June 9,10 not a single line was devoted to the epoch-making event in the Crystal Palace. One must comb painstakingly through the archives to find any trace whatsoever of the experiment. In its issue of June 10, 1854, in a sidebar entitled “Crystal Palace Notes,” Scientific American presented some novelties to be found in the fair’s “machine arcade.” Between appreciations of a cigar rolling machine and a whaling harpoon, mention is made of a “new and excellent platform elevator, by Mr. Otis, of Yonkers, N.Y. . . . It is worked by steam power, and operates like some of the elevators in cotton factories. It has a plain platform, which runs up and down on guides. . . . It is self-acting, safe, and convenient.” There was no mention of the safety device or its spectacular demonstration.

In the major American daily newspapers and magazines, the 1854 event showed up only in two marginal locations. In addition to the Scientific American article, a brief report appeared on May 30, 1854, in the New York Daily Tribune, which mentioned the daring of the inventor “who, as he rides up and down the platform occasionally cuts the rope by which it is supported.” No further contemporary traces can be found ( just as there were no obituaries of Elisha Otis in 1861). Thus it is no exaggeration to say that the demonstration in the Crystal Palace, that “authentic great moment in architectural history,” went almost completely unnoticed by the public. If one sets out to trace the contemporary perspective on the emergence of the elevator in the United States between 1850 and 1880, one is more likely to discover a different foundational narrative. Up to the beginning of the twentieth century, every account of the elevator’s history credits another mechanic with a similar-sounding name, Otis Tufts, with its invention, although he is almost forgotten today.

In 1859, Tufts patented an apparatus called a “Vertical Railway” or “Vertical Screw Elevator.” It was the first to have a completely enclosed cab, propelled by a twenty-inch-wide steam-driven iron screw running through its center. In the same year, the only examples ever produced of this slow and costly but extremely safe elevator were installed in the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York City and the Continental Hotel in Philadelphia. While the proprietors of the Haughwout store had Elisha Otis’s first passenger elevator of 1857 removed three years after its installation because the public refused to accept it, the two elevators built by Tufts remained in service into the 1870s and for a while transformed the hotels into overrun tourist attractions. It is instructive to realize how definitively the earliest texts on the history of the elevator ascribed the pioneering role to the Boston inventor, hailed after his death in November 1869 as “one of the most successful inventors of the last thirty years.” In 1880, the American Architect and Building News began its extensive article “Notes on Elevators” by remarking how recently these “now indispensable conveniences” were born.

“Although steam freight-hoists have been known for forty years, it is about twenty since the first passenger-elevator or ‘vertical railway,’ as it was called, was constructed by the late Otis Tufts. . . . This cumbrous and costly apparatus kept the field to itself for some time.” Two years later, Sloane Kennedy, writing for Harper’s Monthly, made the not-quite-accurate claim to be the first historian of the new means of conveyance: “The story of the invention of the passenger elevator has never up to this time been told, and the present paper is therefore a new chapter in the history of inventions.” He too regarded Tufts’s role as beyond question: “It is to the brilliant genius and energy of the Boston inventor (now deceased) that the credit is due of inventing and constructing the first passenger elevator in the world driven by steam power.” The name Elisha Otis appears in Kennedy’s essay only once, in a sentence about “other early inventors and patentees of portions of elevator machinery.” His emergency brake, the decisive watershed in the canonical history of the elevator, was in 1882 still considered an inessential addition.

Otis Tufts was the definitive historical figure, an opinion still held in the following decades. Thus the New York Times included the “vertical railway” (not the “elevator”) in an 1891 article on epoch-making inventions of the nineteenth century, and one of the largest elevator manufacturers in Chicago, when queried in 1903 about the early history of his product, answered, “The first elevators for use as passenger lifts, of which I have any knowledge, were the screw-elevators built by Otis Tufft [sic], of Boston, in 1859.” We need to grope our way back to the turning point at which a figure like Otis Tufts slipped into the background and the currently accepted foundational narrative began to take hold. When and why did an experiment that for fifty years was perceived as a subsidiary anecdote at best metamorphose into an epoch-making moment? How is it that for decades, all research on the history of the elevator referred to an event for which, because of the absence of contemporary interest, there is hardly any evidence?

(In fact, it was falsely dated time and time again: according to Jeannot Simmen and Uwe Drepper, Otis’s experiment took place “in the New York Crystal Palace in 1853,” and Jean Gavois also wrote that “Otis demonstrated his safety elevator… in 1853.”) Without doubt, the ex-post-facto valorization of this primal scene has to do first and foremost with the business interests of the world’s largest producer of elevators. From the 1870s onward, Otis Brothers and Company, the business founded by Elisha Otis’s two enterprising sons, developed into the leading manufacturer of elevators. With the founding of the Otis Elevator Company in 1898, it absorbed its fourteen leading American competitors. In addition to its monopoly of elevator production, the company was also intent on establishing historiographic hegemony over the apparatus. It is no accident that the historical account that first places the experiment in the Crystal Palace at the center of the elevator’s history was written by Elisha’s son Charles.

In 1911, he declared his intention to replace the “kindly intentioned but somewhat inaccurate notices” honoring the hundredth anniversary of the worldwide enterprise’s founder with the true story. His account included a minute depiction of the demonstration that had excited so little notice in 1854 and declared it to be the birth of the passenger elevator. Otis Tufts, on the other hand, put in an appearance as a mere epigone who adopted the promising invention of Elisha Otis and wheedled the hotel owners of New York and Philadelphia into buying his shoddily constructed machines (Charles Otis mentioned a serious accident in the Continental Hotel, an incident for which no other evidence exists). The influence of this text on the historiography of the elevator is obvious from the fact that after 1911, there was hardly a mention of the elevator’s origins that did not begin by repeating the story of the event in the Crystal Palace. At the same time Otis Tufts, whose contribution to elevator construction was by no means restricted to the exotic “Vertical Screw Elevator,” was downgraded to a transient bit player of the early years.

The most important producer of the conveyance was now regarded as its inventor as well, and one can trace how this narrative was cemented in place in the course of the twentieth century—especially, of course, by the Otis Company itself, whose publications in any case constitute a considerable part of the historical literature. On the 125th anniversary of the founding of the E. G. Otis Elevator Company, the firm even printed up a facsimile newspaper with imaginary historical articles, thereby creating out of whole cloth the contemporary interest in Otis’s experiment that in truth did not exist. Under a masthead reading “New York, 1854” and in a layout reminiscent of the New York Times, one could read about a “young inventor” presenting his safety elevator “in a daring exhibition before thousands of viewers.” “This reporter noted that as the platform went up, without question, everyone in the hall stopped to see what would happen next.” This “anniversary edition” also contained a striking iconographic embellishment of the event: next to the article was an illustration that was often reproduced in subsequent years. It purported to supply an impression of the excitement in the Crystal Palace.

According to the historian of the Otis Company, this illustration was based on a sketch made during the demonstration by an artist for the New York Recorder. In all the older literature about the experiment, however (including that issued by the Otis Company itself ), the event was sketched in a significantly more modest way. We are justified in assuming that the most famous and by now “official” illustration of the experiment was in fact drawn in 1978. The teeming, astonished onlookers as well as the assistant who has just severed the suspension cable are inventions of the recent past. It is no surprise that the largest manufacturer of a technical apparatus has an interest in retroactively claiming credit for its invention. In the course of the last hundred years, however, the stage-managed event in the Crystal Palace was so consistently and unanimously depicted as the elevator’s primal scene that there had to have been more at work in this consensus than just a public relations strategy of the company. It had to do, rather, with the question of how to construct a foundational narrative in the history of technology.

If it is precisely this event among the dozens of possible candidates between 1840 and 1860 that establishes itself as the elevator’s beginning, if after half a century of neglect it still retains the power to suppress competing dates, then one has to wonder what has made it so persistent. One answer lies perhaps in the way Otis’s invention is presented. The theatricality of the demonstration (however unimpressed contemporary witnesses may have been) places this contribution to the elevator’s development above the crowd of equally important but less dramatic turning points, such as the first installation of guide rails in a factory or the first construction of a completely enclosed cab. The concentrated format of a public demonstration satisfies the yearning for a clean, unambiguous beginning, a yearning endemic to the historiography of technology. The dramaturgy of the experiment in the Crystal Palace also contributes to this outcome: Otis focused his demonstration of the innovation on a radical moment — the assumed fatal severing of the cable — and thus accommodated the interest of historians in locating the beginning in a single, visible moment. One must pay attention to the widely reproduced illustration of the experiment, drawn long after the event.

It attempts to encompass precisely the historical moment: the cable has been severed, the witnesses freeze, yet the platform does not fall. Why then has the demonstration at the New York industrial exhibition established itself as the primal scene? Not because it is in fact clearly identifiable as the beginning, but rather for aesthetic reasons—because it makes the beginning tellable. Otis provides an appropriate narrative for the birth of the elevator, a classically Aristotelian narrative, in fact: the hero’s rise into the air in the Crystal Palace moves toward a literal peripeteia, a tragic reversal — until the safety catch interrupts his fall. The epochal status of the event, at any rate, illustrates the discursive mechanisms by which the “origin of a technical fact” comes into being, to use the words of the historian of science Ludwik Fleck. In his study of syphilis research around 1900, Fleck spells out how years of collective and anonymous work on serological experiments were retroactively attributed to a single investigator.

A process of countless laboratory corrections and adjustments that in the end led to the reliability of the test was transformed into a datable act, an individual invention (the “Wassermann reaction” of 1906) in order to ensure a clear historical narrative. The “straight path to knowledge,” which Fleck’s discourse analysis exposes as a fiction, is preserved by all histories of the elevator that begin in the Crystal Palace in 1854; out of the “thinking collective” of mechanics in the middle of the nineteenth century, a single name and a single event are distilled. But the closer one examines this seemingly clear distillate, the cloudier it becomes. Inventing the multistory building In the second half of the nineteenth century, at the beginning of the restructuring process known as the era of urbanization, the architecture of residential and commercial buildings changed in fundamental ways. Up to that point, a building as a rule represented a self-contained, straightforward entity with at most one or two stories above the ground floor.

As the autonomous sphere of an extended family and the domestic servants included in its collective, the “house” evoked, for instance, that sentimental image of the “integral house” that the cultural historian Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl attempted to breathe life into one last time in his well-known work “Die Naturgeschichte des Volkes” (“Natural History of the German People”) of 1854. But what appeared there as the evocation of a lifestyle already in the process of dissolution — in view of the first “sad, bleak apartment blocks of our large cities” —lost its significance entirely by the end of the century. Riehl’s defense of an economic and social community under one roof became irrelevant to the extent that the house intended for a single family all but disappeared in the burgeoning cities, to be replaced by a new type of building. In several respects, the new five- or six-story tenement houses that became a defining architectural feature of European cities between 1860 and 1900 began to extend and diversify the image of the house.

For one thing, their vertical extension led naturally to the individual building being divided into a multiplicity of units housing a great variety of residents, a practice that dismembered the model of an “integral house” once and for all. For another, this extension pointed in a less visible direction: the simultaneous appearance of advances such as central heating, sewerage, intercoms, elevators, and, a little later, electricity ensured that from the 1870s on, the interior of the building was crisscrossed by a complex of pipes, cables, and shafts. Beneath the visible surface there arose an invisible network that organized the circulation of energy, data, and people. In the end, this process of mechanization and electrification made it necessary for the formerly independent unit of the house to become networked with its surroundings, for only the connection to external power sources and centrally regulated reservoirs and generators ensured the functionality of its technical installations. The demarcations between the individual buildings of a residential neighborhood became more and more porous. The elevator played a major role in this profound reorganization of the building.

Even the creators of the first multi-story structures in New York and Chicago emphasized that above a certain number of floors, this means of conveyance was the basic prerequisite for further increases in building height. The installation of the elevator propelled the expansion and diversification of the building, and not just in the obvious sense that it is what made buildings of more than five or six stories possible in the first place. In the form of a cab closed to view from outside and moving through the middle of the building, it created a novel, hermetically sealed conduit. One of the most important characteristics of modern apartment and office buildings is that they consist to a large extent of previously unknown semi-public spaces such as stairwells and corridors. Suddenly, in the traditionally encapsulated family sphere of the residential building, it was possible to encounter strangers almost anywhere, and such encounters became even more focused in the elevator. Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl saw the incipient decline of the “integral house” in the contraction of the once generously proportioned communal spaces of urban middle-class houses “to a tiny corner.” The multistory apartment and office buildings that were standard by the end of the nineteenth century no longer had such spaces.

The floor plan was divided into private residential or commercial parcels on the one hand and spaces devoted solely to traffic circulation on the other—a fragmentation vehemently criticized a century after Riehl by Gaston Bachelard in “The Poetics of Space”: “In Paris there are no houses, and the inhabitants of the big city live in superimposed boxes.” And precisely that fact raises a question that we will revisit in the following chapters: to what extent did the appearance of the new architectural element “elevator” (a shaft that in equal measure domesticates and obscures verticality, a conveyance in which for the first time one can reach the upper levels of a building without the slightest effort, a cab that irritates its occupants with its cramped interior but is invisible from the outside) determine the organization and perception of multistory buildings or, especially in European cities, massively reshape an already existing order? Emerging in New York in the 1850s, the elevator became established at different rates of speed in Europe and the United States.

In the United States it was already a standard feature of large East Coast hotels by the early 1860s, and by 1870 was installed in New York’s Equitable Life Building (its first use in a multistory office building), but this means of conveyance remained almost unknown in Europe well into the late 1860s, at the most occurring as a purely hand-operated device for moving freight between floors in a factory. Only with the development of the extremely safe hydraulic elevator first exhibited at the 1867 Paris World’s Fair (with its cab attached to a piston located below ground level, which pushed the elevator upwards when filled with water under pressure) did the apparatus begin to find widespread use in France and soon thereafter in Germany. For instance, the acceptance of the hydraulic technique led to the installation of passenger elevators in Berlin hotels and commercial buildings in the 1870s. The earliest articles on elevators in engineering and construction journals, however, revealed how unusual the device still was. An 1874 article titled “Hydraulic Elevators for Passengers and Light Freight” in Berlin, for example, listed every single building equipped with the new conveyance.

“Up to now,” according to an 1887 monograph, “the number of passenger elevators installed in Berlin is small. The majority are in hotels, a smaller number in buildings with many offices, etc., and finally, a very small number in purely residential buildings.” In large American cities of the time, there were hardly any multistory residential or commercial buildings that could get by without an elevator. In Germany, by contrast, the vertical transportation of people remained an exception well into the 1890s, when elevators operated either directly or indirectly by hydraulics were replaced by installations with electric drives. Besides this difference in the speed with which elevators proliferated, there was also a difference in their location within buildings. In New York, Boston, and Chicago, the elevator soon functioned as the core of the building. From the 1870s on, every new multistory building was constructed around an elevator shaft. Open stairwells retrofitted with elevators, even today still frequently to be found in apartment buildings in Paris or Vienna, virtually disappeared in the United States by the end of the nineteenth century.

Thus in large American cities, the verticality of the buildings was determined much sooner by the conduit of the elevator. In “Delirious New York,” Rem Koolhaas provides a particularly vivid image of this essential status of the elevator shaft when he describes the demolition of the old Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, beginning in 1929, and the start of construction on the Empire State Building on the same site. At a time when very few German buildings existed with a floor plan clearly determined by the elevator, it had long been utterly standard that the elevator shafts constituted the center of a building in the birthplace of this means of transport. “The destruction of the Waldorf is planned as part of the construction. Fragments that are useful remain, such as the elevator cores that now reach into the as yet immaterial floors of the Empire State.” The supervising architect even mentioned the elevators in his autobiography, as quoted by Koolhaas: “We salvaged four passenger elevators from the old building and installed them in temporary positions in the new framework.” The inseparable link between the rise of the elevator and the vertical extension of the building, especially in the United States, is well documented in the literature on the history of high-rise buildings.

As early as 1891, a New York architectural historian noted, “The perfection of elevator work is the one fundamental condition for high buildings,” and in the first monograph on the origin of the skyscraper, Francisco Mujica writes this lovely sentence: “The entire history of skyscrapers contains an homage to the inventors of the elevator.” This homage would need to point out that in the 1850s and 1860s, it would have been perfectly possible to construct hotels and commercial buildings with more than the prevailing six-story limit, but hotel guests or renters could not be expected to climb an even greater number of stairs. The author of an 1897 article addressed the increasing lack of space in the business districts of Manhattan: “Limited as to the ground, business sought in the air. It had to be done; but how? To pile up more stories on the sixth was useless, since no one would climb up to them. The problem became mechanical, and the financier and the architect were as helpless as the mason.” The solution to the problem took the form of an automatic means of conveyance: “The passenger elevator was the solution. . .

It was to be to modern building what the steam-engine is to transportation, a revolutionary agent.” In New York around 1875, the elevator enabled an increase in building height to about eleven stories. A series of insurance and newspaper buildings were constructed during those years and dubbed “elevator buildings,” enshrining their sine qua non in their very name. Eleven or twelve stories, however, was their vertical limit, since for any additional stories the walls of the lower floors would have to be so massively expanded and stabilized that any gain in space and rent would be negligible. “There came a time,” continued the same article on the commercial buildings of Manhattan, “when to go higher with the solid masonry method was to lose more income at the bottom than was won on the top.” This dilemma was famously solved at the beginning of the 1880s, in the wake of the great Chicago fire, by the development of steel frame construction, which greatly increased the potential number of floors by transferring the load-bearing function of masonry walls to a steel skeleton. For a period of ten to fifteen years, the elevator machinery itself — the previously obligatory hydraulic apparatus—suddenly seemed to be the limiting factor.

Thanks to steel frame construction, it would already be possible to construct a fifty-story building, but the hydraulic technique imposed a limit of eighteen to twenty floors. “To build higher than that would be entirely uneconomic, due to the slowness of elevators and the excessive space occupied by them and their voluminous machinery.” In the end, it was electrically powered elevators with their more modest space requirements and improved speed ( from 5 feet per second of hydraulic elevators to 9.8 to 16 feet per second within a decade49) that cleared the way for almost limitless increases in building height, a jump whose extent is suggested by the fact that in the 1890s, the highest building in the world was the twenty-story Masonic Temple in Chicago, but the Woolworth Building, completed in 1913, stood at fifty-five stories. In the twentieth-century literature on the history of architecture, there have been frequent debates about which element — the elevator or steel frame construction — was decisive for the rapid increase in vertical expansion.

Even if one doesn’t adopt the consistent position of the earliest historian of the skyscraper, who accords the elevator exclusive credit for this development (“It is the elevator that is the initial cause of the skyscraper. Steel skeleton is a consequence of the elevator”), there is no question of the fundamental role played by this means of conveyance. No one has expressed this more succinctly than a German commentator on the opening of the Woolworth Building: “It must be admitted that the possibility of a fifty-five-story building is founded primarily on the perfect operation of passenger elevators. (Climbing to the top floor on steps with risers of 4.7 inches would take about 1/4 of an hour!)” Excerpted from “Lifted: A Cultural History of the Elevator” by Andreas Bernard. Copyright © 2014 by Andreas Bernard. Reprinted by arrangement with NYU Press. All rights reserved. Who Invented the Elevator? Who Invented the Elevator? Go to permalink The history of the elevator, if you define it as a platform that can move people and objects up and down, is actually a rather long one.

Rudimentary elevators are known to have been in use in ancient Rome as far back as 336 B.C., with the first reference of one built by the talented Archimedes. Advertisement These early elevators were open cars rather than enclosed ones, and consisted of a platform with hoists that would enable the car to move vertically. The hoists were typically worked manually, either by people or animals, though sometimes water wheels were used. Romans continued to use these simple elevators for many years, usually to move water, building materials, or other heavy items from one place to another. As for the dedicated passenger elevator, this was created in the 18th century, with one of the first used by King Louis XV in 1743. He had an elevator constructed at Versailles that would carry him from his apartments on the first floor to his mistress' apartments on the second floor. This elevator wasn't much more technologically advanced than those used in Rome. To make it work, men stationed in a chimney pulled on the ropes. They called it a "flying chair." Advertisement It wasn't until the 1800s that elevator technology really started to advance.

For starters, elevators no longer needed to be worked manually. In 1823, two British architects—Burton and Hormer—built a steam-powered "ascending room" to take tourists up to a platform for a view of London. Several years later, their invention was expanded upon by architects Frost and Stutt who added a belt and counter-weight to the steam power. Soon enough, hydraulic systems began to be created as well, using water pressure to raise and lower the elevator car. However, this wasn't practical in some cases—pits had to be dug below the elevator shaft to enable the piston to pull back. The higher the elevator went, the deeper the pit had to be. Thus, this wasn't a viable option for taller buildings in big cities. So despite the hydraulic systems being somewhat safer than steam-powered/cabled elevators, the steam powered ones with cables and counterweights, stuck around. They had just one major drawback: the cables could snap, and sometimes did, which sent the elevator plummeting to the bottom of the shaft, killing passengers and damaging building materials or other items being transported.

Needless to say, no one was jumping to get on these dangerous elevators and so passenger elevators up to this point were largely a novelty. Sponsored The man who solved the elevator safety problem, making skyscrapers possible, was Elisha Otis, who is generally known as the inventor of the modern elevator. In 1852, Otis came up with a design that had a safety "brake." In the event that the cables broke, a wooden frame at the top of the elevator car would snap out and hit the walls of the shaft, stopping the elevator in its tracks. Otis himself demonstrated the device, which he called a "safety hoist," at the New York World's Fair in 1854, when he went up in a make-shift elevator himself and had the ropes cut. Rather than plummeting to his death as the audience thought might happen, his safety hoist snapped out, catching the elevator within seconds. Needless to say, the crowd was impressed. Advertisement Advertisement Otis went on to found his own elevator company, which installed the first public elevator in a New York building in 1874.

The Otis Elevator Company is still known today as the world's largest elevator manufacturer. While the cable elevator design has remained, many additional improvements have been made, the most obvious of which is that elevators now run on electricity rather than steam power, a change that came about starting in the 1880s. The electric elevator was patented by Alexander Miles in 1887, though one had been built by the German inventor Werner von Siemens in 1880. Otis' safety hoist wasn't the end of safety innovation, either. These days, it's virtually impossible for an elevator to plummet and kill passengers. There are now multiple steel cables to hold the elevator's weight, plus a number of different braking systems to stop an elevator from falling if the cables somehow snap. If, despite all these safety measures, the elevator does fall, there are shock absorbers at the bottom of the shaft, making it unlikely death will occur and reducing the possibility of serious injury. Advertisement The Battleship and the Slinky Bonus Facts: Elisha Otis is not considered to be the inventor of the modern elevator by everyone.

Another man, Otis Tufts, patented an elevator design that had doors that opened and closed automatically and benches inside. However, Tufts' design did away with the typical cable system because of the safety issues, and instead used an impractical, expensive system of threading the elevator car up a giant screw. Obviously, this would be prohibitively expensive in tall buildings. Elisha Otis' design was much simpler (and closer to modern designs), easier to use, and less expensive to make, which is why he generally gets the credit and not Tufts. That said, the "Vertical Screw Railway" was installed in a few buildings in New York and Philadelphia. The first elevator shaft was put in a building before Elisha Otis designed his safe, steam powered elevator. This was done in 1853 at the Cooper Union Foundation building in New York. Peter Cooper felt that elevators would be perfected and made safe at some point in the near future, so included it in the design of the building. It took a couple decades, but an elevator was eventually installed in the shaft by Elisha Otis' company.

Elisha Otis was born into a farming family in 1811, but he spent a lot of time at the blacksmith's as a child, fascinated by tools and making things. He created a number of inventions to help out around the farm, including a pulley and lift system. At one point, he also worked in a bed-making factory and built a machine that increased production rates significantly. Otis' daring elevator safety demonstration at the World Fair was hyped up by Phineas Barnum, who is also responsible for making phrases like "jump on the bandwagon" popular . Otis Tufts also invented the steam-powered printing press and steam-powered pile driver. Emily Upton writes for the wildly popular interesting fact website TodayIFoundOut.com . To subscribe to Today I Found Out's "Daily Knowledge" newsletter, click here or like them on Facebook here . You can also check 'em out on YouTube here . Advertisement

Question: When Elisha Graves Otis invented it, he called it the safety hoist. What do we call it now?
Answer: The elevator